


Prognosis Uncertain

by Beth Harker (chiana606), chiana606



Category: Newsies (1992)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, Jo's Boys, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-06
Updated: 2013-10-06
Packaged: 2017-12-28 14:55:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/993232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chiana606/pseuds/Beth%20Harker, https://archiveofourown.org/users/chiana606/pseuds/chiana606
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bad news arrives from home while Jack and David are living together in far off land called Santa Fe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Prognosis Uncertain

**Author's Note:**

> I borrowed the character "Nan" from the Louisa May Alcott novel "Jo's Boys". you don't need to know who she is at all to read and understand the fic. She's an amazing character, though.

Mom. Flu. Prognosis uncertain. Love you.  
-S 

David stood by the door holding the telegram in his hands. He’d tipped the boy who’d delivered the thing. He’d listened to the door slide shut. He’d opened it, and of course he’d read it. The last two actions had been unnecessary. At two cents per word, David knew that Sarah never would have sent it to him if there wasn’t some kind of disaster, and if it hadn’t been too urgent to allow for their correspondence to take its usual month long journey between New York and Santa Fe. Even so, he read the words again and again, until the impact of them was carved upon his heart and shone in his eyes and the way that his hands shook. 

He let out a breath, ran a hand through his hair. He folded the telegram back up, and was about to put it in the pocket of his trousers when he felt Jack come up behind him, one hand pulling the paper from his grasp and the other landing on his shoulder. 

Jack let out a low whistle when he read the news for himself. “Shit,” was all he said.

“Yeah.” 

“Do you wanna…” Jack trailed off. 

“I should go to work,” David said. He could feel Jack tugging at his arm, so he’d have to turn around and face him. He didn’t resist. Jack’s face had that terribly young look that it could get at times, even at twenty. He didn’t know what to do, David realized. He sort of wished that Jack did, but he didn’t. 

“I really do have to go to work,” David said again. “You know how Nan is. Giving the city kid a chance and all. No real excuses to turn up late, especially when we live so close. Besides, there’s that kid with purtussis, and the sick lady I’m supposed to look in on. You remember? The sick one who is….well, she’s sick.” 

Jack gripped the telegram tighter. 

“They’re all sick, genius. That’s why they got you seeing them.” 

On one hand Jack’s expression had settled into something a little more normal. On the other, David had the strangest feeling that Jack could see right through him. 

“Right. They are.” 

He gave an emphatic nod, but since he did it just as Jack was moving in to kiss him, he ended up with his partner’s lips somewhere near the corner of his eyeball. David blinked, and Jack took hold of his face for a firmer kiss. 

David didn’t have anything to say to Jack as he shut the door. Jack had already said a lot to him, without having to utter a single word. 

\---

Work was physically exhausting, but it was what Jack needed. It wasn’t that herding cows and mucking out stables was less difficult than the six factory jobs that Jack had quit before deciding that New York was eating him alive and another week there would kill him. It was just better. It was brighter. There was sunlight. The last job Jack had tried had been boat building, and it’d been almost okay by the virtue of being outside, but his boss had been a jerk. That was the problem with bosses. They were all jerks. 

At least in New York. Work was different in Santa Fe. It wasn’t a matter of making a hundred table legs, a thousand knickerbockers, or a million socks in one week. It was a matter of bullying the land into doing what you wanted to, so it would produce food and sustain cattle. Big industry would have to wait until everything else got tamed. Maybe it never would get tamed. And that was good. It meant that Jack could have all the fresh air and sunshine he wanted, and and David’s book smarts were enough of an anomaly to open a few doors for him as well.

Jack went about his day, watering the horses he was supposed to water, brushing down the ones he was meant to brush, joining some other fellows to lift hay from the fields into a cart in piles that reminded him of the skyscrapers that Mush had found a job helping to build.

His mind wasn’t so much on the work he was doing, though, but on the things David had sacrificed to come here with him. That was something he’d thought of a lot at first, when David had agreed to try this as a one year experiment. Jack had spent a lot of time trying to gage whether David enjoyed farm work or was bored, and though he’d never said a word about how he smell of chicken shit in the morning didn’t fill him with inspiration, he’d brightened up and become much happier after Nan had taken him on as an apprentice. 

It had been a long time since Jack had wondered if David might be homesick. He hadn’t even thought much about it, since the first couple of weeks when he had been pretty obvious about it. He wondered about that now, though. 

It was weird, how sometimes you could not think about work, then look up and realize that it had practically done itself. Lifting hay was the perfect task for that kind of thing, too. Get lost thinking about David, then look up and see… boom! All the hay piled up to the clouds, the day mostly over, and plenty more worry left to occupy you on the journey home. 

\---- 

“The problem back in Concord,” Nan was saying, as she went through her paperwork for the day, “was the antivaccinationists. Here it’s that there aren’t half enough doctors, and nobody thinks to send the vaccinations our way.” 

David nodded. Usually he liked listening to Nan. She knew her trade remarkably well, and she was adventuress. She had a decisive way about her that got everybody’s attention, even Jack’s, who had promised to go to her and only her if he ever fell ill. 

“It’s a shame. There’s no reason for a child to be exposed to a disease that gums up his lungs and steals his constitution just as he’s starting to develop it. Then there are the native populations, who have no immunity and seemingly nobody to care about what we’re exposing them to.” 

Another nod. David was thinking about the telegram again, going over each of the words he’d memorized. It struck him that the most important words had been, “uncertain” and “love you.” 

“Uncertain” gave him hope. It had more letters than bad, and more letters than dire. Sarah would not have paid to use the word “uncertain” if it hadn’t been the right one. Uncertain meant that there was some chance of recovery, and that that chance wasn’t as slim as it could be. 

The “Love you”, however, was almost certainly bad. It had probably been put there to fortify him against the impending doom. It was also unclear, due to the lack of subject pronouns, whether Sarah was telling him that she loved him or that their mom loved him. 

Their mom did love him, though, and he wasn’t there with her. Probably she was writhing with fever now, unable to get out of bed. Maybe she was delirious. David had seen a man die of influenza just the other day. He’d had an entire conversation with his daughter prior to passing on, only the daughter had left five years ago, ironically for New York. The man had seemed peaceful, and the hallucinatory daughter had been very forgiving of his past trespasses, but the fact remained that he had been talking for an hour to an empty chair.

“And as I was saying, the effects of the purtussis virus upon the horse population is particularly unique, in that it allows them metamorphosize into unicorns and fly over the moon.” 

“Wait…” David shook his head to clear it. “What?” 

Nan laughed. “I’ve been wondering just when you were going to ask me that question, since when I told you about how the Black Death was directly caused by females attempting to enter the medical profession you just nodded and stared at your hands. Am I to suppose that that sounded more probable to you than soaring unicorns?” 

“No,” David said. “It’s the opposite of probable.” That was why Nan kept him around, after all. “Sorry,” he added after a moment’s thought. 

“It’s fine. I’ve been working on your diagnosis.” 

“I have a diagnosis?” 

“You have a set of symptoms. Acute distraction with a touch of melancholy. Paleness of constitution. Nervous habits. Fidgeting. Muttering to oneself. No diagnosis as of yet. It could be any number of things.” 

“Oh,” David said. He hadn’t realized that it had been so obvious that something was wrong. “Prognosis?” 

As soon as he’d said that word, David wished he hadn’t. He already knew the answer to that question. Uncertain. A miserable kind of heat rose in his face. 

“You’ll live,” was Nan’s blunt reply. “The question is whether you need to go home and take a rest.” 

“I’m fine.” 

Nan nodded, “In that case, try to pay attention, or your patients might not be so lucky.” 

\-----

The main thing that Jack noticed about David over the next couple of days was that he couldn’t pay attention to anything. At least not anything that didn’t come from within himself. It was easy to get him to go off on monologues on any topic imaginable, from Greek Mythology to Vikings, to the effects of coffee upon the human nervous-system, but Jack knew him well enough to know that he wasn’t invested in anything that he was saying. 

What he was really invested in was that telegram. Jack had lost count of how many times he’d read it. It wasn’t even in Sarah’s handwriting. It was typed out. If Sarah had written it herself, Jack could kind of understand, but she hadn’t. It was just this one terrible piece of paper.

Three days after the thing arrived Jack took it upon himself to dig out all of the old letters that the family had sent David and him from the drawer where David kept them stacked neatly in chronological order. David only looked at them, stricken, and completely at a loss as to what Jack meant for him to do. It wasn’t like Jack couldn’t figure out why taking them out might have been a bad idea. He’d just been hoping that it wouldn’t be, was all. 

On the sixth day David went through a bag that his mom had packed for him just before he’d left with Jack, and snuck into his bag to prevent him protesting that the things were silly and leaving without them. Some of the things Jack recognized, like a suspiciously kangaroo-like stuffed tyrannosaurus that Sarah had made for David when he was just a little thing, and a blanket that it had baffled David to see included in the bag at all. David had told him once how that had been his first blanket when he was a baby, and his mother had spent a good deal of his toddlerhood saving it from being thrown out windows or burnt on woodstoves, before tucking it away to suit her own sentimentality. The blanket was the thing that David looked the longest at before packing all of the things back away again. 

A photograph of his mom and pop on their wedding day, the only that they’d ever had taken, ended up propped up on the desk instead of back in the bag. 

“We never decorated,” David explained. “Guess I wasn’t expecting to stay here so long.” 

“Well, you said you’d give it a year and all…” 

“I know what I said.” David’s voice came out sharp, probably sharper than he’d expected. He didn’t take the words back or apologize, but he did mutter an invitation for Jack to do some decorating of his own, provided it wasn’t “godawful.” 

Jack rose to the occasion by painting a likeness of Spot Conlon slaying a dragon on an old wooden plank he’d found in the barn and hanging it on the wall. It might not have been the best piece of artwork, but only having some sticky red paint and a time-stiffened brush to work with provided a handy excuse. Besides, the picture made David laugh and try and hide that he was laughing in a way that Jack had become accustomed to and missed seeing ever since the news from home had arrived. 

Then again, sometimes David laughed when he was tired, and he hadn’t been sleeping much lately. Jack didn’t want to think about it, but he couldn’t keep it from entering the back of his mind as he started his next artistic project, a rendition of Mush attempting to carry out his promise of looking after David’s cat for him, and getting mauled in the process. 

\----

In retrospect, the stomach bug was David’s own fault. He’d spent the night at the home of a man who had it, trying to keep him clean and not too dehydrated. It wasn’t a fun job or a terribly challenging one, but Nan had been trying to teach him that in the medical field being able to play nursemaid to the sick was every bit as important as learning how to open them up and perform surgery. Both saved lives, but one was seen as a grand and noble pinnacle of human ability, while the other one was seen as women’s work. Nan was of the opinion that if she could do both, so could David, and so she’d set him up for a night of sitting by a stranger’s bedside, helping him to drink water, wiping the vomit from his lips, and doing the whole thing with the best bedside manner he could muster.

… The best bedside manner that David could muster was a distracted one. The man didn’t say anything about it, but David knew he hadn’t performed well enough, particularly when he woke up in the middle of the watch he’d been supposed to be keeping with his head in his hands and a mess in the bed that he had to clean up. 

Nan had warned him that it was contagious. She’d warned him to wash his hands a lot and avoid touching his face.

Sure enough, David woke up from what little sleep he’d been able to get the next night with a jabbing pain in his stomach and the urgent need to empty it of every morsel of food he’d put in it during the last ten years of his life. The fact that he knew the diagnosis and prognosis for what was going on with him didn’t do much to help David feel better. The symptoms were pretty awful. 

Jack was squatting down next to him on the bathroom floor sometime before morning. 

“Hey.” 

David rolled his eyes, but since he was rolling them towards the toilet bowl, he doubted Jack noticed. David might have said more, but he started gagging again at that point. 

“Come on Doc,” Jack said as he finished. David could feel his hands just about everywhere on his back and neck, which was usually a good thing. “You can go back to bed, and I’ll get you a bucket or something. Won’t disturb you any.” 

“No.” 

This time it was Jack’s turn to roll his eyes. David couldn’t see him do it, but he could hear it in his voice. “Yep,” he said. “That’s what we’re doing.”

Jack started to pull David to his feet and got an elbow in the rib for his trouble. 

“It will go away in about two days,” David started to explain. “You will wash your hands now, and let me deal with it because I know what I’m doing…” 

“Sure Dave… you know exactly what you’re doing,” Jack started, frustrated.

“And you don’t.” David cut him off curtly. “Furthermore, if you touch me again, I’m going to kiss you on the lips. It’s going to taste like throw up, and then you’re going to be stuck here puking up your insides for at least 48 hours.” 

Jack moved like he would lift David to his feet anyway, but David inclined his body closer into his arms, leaning in towards Jack’s lips.

“Jesus Dave,” Jack swore, fully letting go of David just in time for him to be sick into the toilet instead of somewhere on Jack’s person. 

Jack left him after that, though he didn’t fully let him alone. For the first hour or so he called out to David about how comfortable the bed was every fifteen minutes. It decreased to about once every hour when Jack failed to get a reaction, but even about twenty hours later the comments hadn’t stopped entirely. Every so often Jack stopped in to make sure that David was still alive. In a way David supposed that he should have been happy that Jack cared, but mostly he wished Jack would stop waking him up every time he dozed off, only to stare worriedly at him after doing it, like he’d honestly been concerned about whether or not he’d be able to rouse him. There were questions, too. Stupid ones. Ones that weren’t relevant. Ones where Jack was just wondering about the history of the typewriter because he’d read something in the papes. 

Eventually David locked the door, and took grim satisfaction in the fact that Jack couldn’t get in, even to use the bathroom. He could go in the bushes if it was so damn important. That’s why they’d moved to Sante Fe anyway. Bushes. Nature. Jack was getting exactly what he wanted. 

\----

Jack was about to head to work when the second telegram came. 

“You have to pay for it,” the boy said when Jack moved to take it. It was weird. They hadn’t had to pay for the last one, but maybe this time Sarah hadn’t been able to. Jack handed the boy the money, and was left holding a piece of paper which might as well have been a bomb. He wondered if he ought to read it first before giving it to Dave. It was addressed to David. Jack didn’t really want to read it. He held it up to the sunlight by the window, to see if he could make out the words through the envelope, and was relieved when he couldn’t. Stupid of him. He’d know what it said soon enough anyway. 

“Dave?” Jack knocked softly at the bathroom door. He’d been practically banging it down before, but it didn’t seem right to do that now. No answer. He knocked again. “Davey? Hey Davey, you got another one of them telegrams.” 

David opened the door. He didn’t look great, all pale and kind of disheveled. He didn’t smell great either, if Jack was going to be honest. The room definitely didn’t. At some point during the night he’d managed to sneak out and drag one of the couch cushions, but it looked like he’d been sick on it.

David tore open the envelope carefully, read the note inside, and sank back down to his knees to throw up again. When he was finished, he handed the envelope over to Jack. 

Jack could feel his own heart, pounding impossibly hard in his chest, and decided it wasn’t a good idea to read it right away, not with David looking the way he did. Jack was beginning to worry that things were so bad that he’d be stuck trying his hand at being the stable, reasonable one, and he wasn’t sure how he was going to do that if that telegram said what he was afraid it did. 

“You could go back,” Jack said. His hand hovered over David’s back. David had told him not to touch him. “Take the money we got saved. Buy a ticket for New York. Help out your family while she’s sick.” 

Saying that made Jack maybe want to throw up himself, and he hadn’t even read the news yet. Between the two of them they probably had enough for one ticket into New York, but not enough get back out. Jack didn’t want to think about New York City swallowing David up, but the idea of him being so far away from his family when they needed him and he needed them wasn’t any good either. 

“Too late,” David said, his voice gone cold. He might as well have punched Jack in the stomach. Jack knelt down next to David, putting a tentative, suddenly sweaty hand on his shoulder. David was shaking just as bad as he was, Jack realized, and through David’s shirt he could feel that his heart was racing just as quickly. David’s breath was coming out in a weird unsteady way, sometimes not at all. He heaved again, but nothing came up. 

“Come on. Breathe Dave. You gotta breathe. You’re practically a doctor. Don’t you know that?” Jack’s voice was rough and low. He could hardly remember his own mother passing, yet somehow he had the distinct feeling that this was same event all over again. The only thing that kept him from being in exactly the same state as David was that David seemed to be listening to him. At least, he was taking in breaths precisely in time with Jack’s words. It made Jack feel like he was doing something.

“There. That’s good Dave,” Jack continued, rubbing David’s back as he spoke. “Breathe. Keep breathing. That’s why Nan gives you all them books, huh? To teach you that gotta keep breathing. It’ll be…” 

The words stuck in Jack’s throat. It wouldn’t be alright. Not for David at least. Jack had dragged him all the way out here and everything had gone wrong. He hadn’t even thought that this could happen. Sure, people had their folks die all the time, but David’s parents weren’t like that. They were dependable. They didn’t just drop dead from some stinking virus. 

David swallowed, shifting away from Jack’s touch. “You can… you should wash your hands. You’re going to get what I have if you don’t. You don’t have to stay here.” 

“Where am I gonna go? Ain’t nowhere else to go. ‘Sides, somebody has to make sure you keep breathing. Nan expects you back at work soon. I saw her in town, and she was asking about you.” 

David gave Jack a look like he was still determined to send him out. Not like that would work anyway, but Jack was readying himself to argue. 

“Make sure I keep breathing then,” David said at last, turning to lie back down on the damp couch cushion. Jack had the sense that he ought to at least turn it over for him, but even small tasks had taken on a discouraging element, like why even bother. Jack leaned back against the bathroom wall, rested his head on his knees, and listened to David breathe.  
It was only several hours later, when some of the guys from work were practically threatening to break down the door, that Jack left. David didn’t even look up to see him go. 

Jack had put the telegram in his pocket before leaving, and it was like a weight there. He kept hoping that he’d lose it, and maybe that’d somehow mean it hadn’t happened. It wasn’t like he ever saw Esther anyway. Santa Fe hadn’t changed. If he never went back… 

He shook his head, and took out the telegram to read. That would solidify things. It would be the dose of reality he needed, because David would think he was an idiot if he went on like everything was fine when the world had practically ended. 

Fever worse. Doctor says she won’t last the night. Love you so much.  
-S

Jack had to read it twice. From David’s reaction, he had assumed that Esther was already… well, probably she was. She had to be. No sense in hoping otherwise. 

\----

Sometime in the middle of the night David realized that he wasn’t throwing up anymore. It had probably been five or six hours since he last had. His stomach didn’t feel settled. He felt like it was tying itself in knots, but he was beginning to figure out that it wasn’t illness that was making it do that. When David sat up the muscles in his abdomen ached like they were tired, but that was it. He was cold and damp all over. He didn’t want to keep lying on the floor. He was done with that. 

His clothes were an absolute wreck, so them off, leaving them in a heap on the floor. He could put them in the basket to be washed, but the very concept of that was as monumentally exhausting as the idea of trying to wash himself. He felt grimy and he hated that, but he was simply too tired. 

He got up, keeping his arms around himself as he walked into the bedroom, and then slipping underneath the covers next to Jack. David wasn’t really surprised when Jack leaned in and pulled him closer. Sleeping like a normal human being wasn’t really Jack’s thing under the best of circumstances. It felt good to have Jack touching him, though. Not in the normal way where Jack’s skin against David’s made him want all kinds of things. It was a lot quieter, something akin to relief. 

It wouldn’t last. 

“I’ve been thinking,” David said softly. His words hit somewhere around Jack’s chest, but he knew he’d hear anyway. “I have to go back to New York.” 

Jack held him tighter. “I know that.” 

For a long time neither of them said anything. David only knew that Jack wasn’t asleep because his grip didn’t loosen a fraction as the minutes went by. 

David didn’t sleep either, but he started to dose on and off. Sometimes he’d dream a little. In one of them his mom was dying, and nobody was with her… they’d all ran off like he had. In others, Les caught the flu, because it was contagious. 

In Santa Fe the birds always woke up about half an hour before the sun did. That’s how David knew that it would start rising soon – he heard bird song. The front door started to shake. 

“Telegram! Telegram!” A voice shouted on the other side, in almost the same tone that David had once used to call out newspaper headlines. He sat bolt upright in bed. His head was swimming. He needed to open the door. He needed to get dressed. 

“I got this,” Jack said. He squeezed David’s shoulder, then pulled a shirt on over his long johns. He closed the door behind him, leaving David to sit waiting for the inevitable bad news. 

\-----

Jack opened the door, trying to keep his less than decent lower half hidden behind it as he met the delivery boy. That much had to be David rubbing off on him – Jack could remember plenty of times in his life when he wouldn’t have cared if the president himself saw him running around in his johns. It wasn’t like he was naked or anything like that. 

“Telegram for David Jacobs,” the boy said, drawing Jack back to reality. 

“Yeah. I know. Do I gotta pay for it this time?” 

The boy shook his head blankly, “The sender always pays.” 

Jack rolled his eyes. “Yeah. Of course. Might want to let your boss know the boy who was here a couple of days ago swindled us out of some cash. You’d think he’d have a little decency, but I guess that’s too much to ask. What’s your name kid?” 

“Josh.”

“I’m going to be calling up your boss to make sure you passed on my message there Josh, got it?” 

The boy nodded, his face as blank as ever. Jack guessed the bright ones didn’t go into the telegram delivering business. Probably meant that anybody with a bit of smarts would just as soon do that as deliver bullet wounds to the head – except for the evil genius types, like the one who’d taken Jack’s money the other day.

“Don’t you want your telegram Mr. Jacobs, sir?” The boy asked, hand outstretched, holding that piece of paper like it wasn’t anything dangerous at all. 

“Yeah. Give it over.” 

Jack snatched it up and slammed the door in the boy’s face. He gave the piece of paper a good shake, swearing under his breath. He had to pace for a bit before he felt like he could go back to David, at least not without turning the whole thing into a rant about the evils of communication, and the habit it had of letting you know when bad things happened in a city that was practically the other side of the world. 

David showed up standing in the doorway of the bedroom. Jack was pacing. He was making plans of what he was going to do to the telegram boy who’d stolen their money. David had put on a shirt and some underthings, which did a little to cover him. Jack let out a breath. Now wasn’t the time to start yelling in David’s general direction. 

“You okay?” David asked. And what a thing to ask. Neither of them were okay, obviously, because they were about to read the details of Esther Jacobs demise. 

“Yeah. Want me to look at it first? Let you know what it says?”

David shook his head. 

“Maybe the both of us oughta sit down first.” Jack suggested. David shrugged, but trudged back to the bed anyway. Jack sat down next to him. 

“Actually,” David said. “Maybe you could just read it to me.” 

If there was anything that Jack was not expecting David to say, it was that. It sounded too much like asking for help. David hardly ever did that. Then again, he’d just spent the last week worrying and the last two days puking his guts out. That was enough to wear anybody down. That didn’t mean that Jack really wanted to be the one to read the telegram though.

“Whatever you want Dave,” Jack heard himself say, as if his voice were coming from far away. He tore the envelope open before he could change his mind. The first thing that he noticed was that it seemed like a lot of text just to tell David that his mom had kicked the bucket. Then he started to read it, and it hardly made sense at all. He had to read it five times before he could even say anything. Jack looked up, eyes shining.

“Dave it’s… she’s…” He took a breath, and tried to clear his throat so he could read the words on the page. “Things took a sudden turn, she’s…” Jack made a wild gesture. His throat had closed up again and he couldn’t finish the sentence, but he knew that if he just waved his arms around enough David would. That’s why the two of them worked so well together in the first place. 

David snatched the telegram away from Jack, reading it for himself. His face reddened then turned very pale. All in all, he didn’t look that much different than he had when he’d gotten the news that his mother was going to die. It was like he couldn’t quite register what he was really reading. Jack reached across the bed and hugged David to him as tight as he could. 

“She’s okay, Davey. She’s fine. She’s okay.” Jack laughed. He thought that if he’d been standing he would’ve picked David up and spun him around the room, and wouldn’t that have surprised him. 

David was laughing too. At least Jack thought that he was laughing. It was only when David buried his face against his neck and Jack felt a hot wetness trickle down there, that Jack realized he was sobbing, and not just a little bit either. David had been completely overtaken by great heaving sobs that shook his entire body until Jack wondered if he might fly apart. 

Jack pulled away from David slightly, so that he could kiss him. He kissed his cheeks, his lips, his temple, anywhere that Jack could get his mouth, he kissed, tasting the saltwater between his lips. He couldn’t fathom why David was crying like this, but Jack wanted him to feel all of the happiness he felt.

“She’s okay,” Jack said again, just in case David hadn’t heard him right before. He wondered if somehow Dave could’ve misunderstood who ‘she’ was, thought he’d meant that Sarah was holding up remarkably well under tragic circumstances something like that. “Your mom’s fine,” Jack continued to explain. “She ain’t gonna to die. She’s getting better. She’s okay.”

David finally nodded, like something Jack had said was getting through to him. He pressed his hand to the bridge of his nose, his face tightening in an effort to make it look normal again. Another gasp escaped his mouth anyway. 

“I can’t stop,” David managed to say with obvious effort. Jack was beginning to understand, just a little bit. If pressed he wouldn’t have been able to explain what was going on with David, but he got it anyway. 

“It’s fine,” Jack said, wrapping his arms around David. “Don’t worry about it. You’re going to be okay too.” 

 

\--End

((Epilogue: Jack caught David’s stomach bug. Sucks to be him.))


End file.
